Introduction to the HTML5 audio tag javascript manipulation

Some of the new exciting features of HTML5 are the audio and video tag. This could potentially, in the long term, replace flash on the video level. I wanted to use the audio tag in one of my experiemental project, there is little information about how to manipulate the audio tag, and tought it would be great to have a starter guide.

One thing clear is this is still an early implementation, which also means it is a bit buggy. I had a strange bug where if I had a song playing and had javascript throw errors at the same time (not related together), I could not terminate the song. Closing the tab would not stop it, I had to restart Firefox. Which lead me to think that the process is still not completely linked only to the tab (in Firefox at least).

I used jquery in my demo because the application I developing is wrapped around it, but this is not necessary.